Building Power and a Livable New York
Brownstoner in the News (New York Magazine)
Supermarkets Flee City’s High Costs (Crain’s New York Business)
Residential Building Permits Plunge by 50% (Crain’s New York Business)
New Study Faults Plazas as Public in Name, Private in Look (New York Times)
Tuesday June 3, 2008, noon- 1pm and 3-4pm
Wednesday June 4, 2008, 9:30-10:30am and 1-2pm
25 Beaver Street, Manhattan
To administer federal funds for the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), Home Investment Partnerships (HOME), Emergency Shelter Grants (ESGP) and Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) programs, New York State must prepare an Annual Action Plan (AAP). New York State’s next AAP will describe the State’s anticipated use of federal CDBG, HOME, ESGP and HOPWA funds in 2009 to address affordable housing and community development needs identified in its Consolidated Plan for 2006-2010. This AAP will also describe the State’s methods for distributing these funds to local grantees.
Interested individuals and organizations are encouraged to participate in the development of New York State’s 2009 AAP by submitting written comments to DHCRConPln@dhcr.state.ny.us. All written comments must be received by June 10, 2008.
The public is also encouraged to attend and offer oral comments at one of a series of public hearings to be held at New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal offices; 25 Beaver Street in New York City. Please be cautioned, building security procedures require each attendee to present a driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID upon entry. For additional information about these public hearings call 1-866-ASK-DHCR (275-3427); or e-mail DHCRConPln@dhcr.state.ny.us
Sunday, June 1, 2008, 11am (Spanish) and 1pm (English)
St. Gabriel R.C. Church, Auditorium, 26-26 98th Street, E. Elmhurst, NY
The sub-prime mortgage crisis and predatory lending are discussed in the last in a series of lectures offered by the City of New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
Sunday, June 1, 2pm
Fee: $15, $12 MAS members
Meet at the S.E. corner of Delancey and Orchard streets. (Transit: F train to Delancey St; #6 train to Spring St)
Francis Morrone, architectural historian, guides this walking tour presented by the Municipal Art Society of New York, as we question the neighborhood’s current gentrification, and what urban virtues the neighborhood retains leading to its new popularity.
Saturday, May 31, 2008, 10a.m. - 1:30p.m.
Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th & 35th streets), Manhattan
Phone: (212) 926-8648
New York City Community Gardens Coalition, encouraging public participation to decide the next steps in meeting green challenges, presents its 4th annual panel discussion and forum on the status of NYC community gardens. Event includes panelists from PlanNYC, New Yorkers for Parks, Sustainable South Bronx, and more.
Saturday, May 31, 2008, 9am - 3pm
PS 282 180 6th Avenue Park Slope Brooklyn
Breakfast, Lunch, and Childcare Provided
Presented by the Fifth Avenue Committee, this all day summit includes four panel discussions:
Protecting Tenants, Building Affordable Housing
Living Wages, Fair Returns
Healthy Homes, Sustainable Communities
Planning to the People
A panel of women leaders and experts present and debate the recent outcomes of the FreshDirect organizing drive, the implications of employer sanctions, and model labor/community organizing efforts. The forum is geared toward women organizers, union elected officials, activists, scholars and students, policy decision makers, and interested individuals and organizations.
Sandy Pope , President International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 805
Joann Lo Enlace
Amy Sugimori of La Fuente,
The New York Civic Participation Project
Angela Cornell, Cornell University
Francine Moccio, Cornell University
Cornell University, Institute for Women & Work, ILR School
Cornell ILR Labor Programs, New York City
Cornell University Law School
&
The Murphy Institute for Worker Education & Labor Studies, CUNY
Cornell University
16 East 34th Street
To register send e-mail to jp326@cornell.edu or
call Jo-Ann Perkins @ (212) 340-2867
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/iww/
Let’s give a deeply deserved round of applause for Mattie Burkert, who has been a driving force behind The Eminent Domain from its inception. Mattie is interning at the incredible Chicago Reporter this summer, and from there she heads into her senior year at NYU. She’ll be posting from time to time, but we’ll miss having Mattie here. Thank you!!
When we first started putting together this site last fall, Alyssa and I spent a lot of trying to figure out just who, exactly, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership was.
According to the organization’s website,
The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership (DBP) is a not-for-profit local development corporation incorporated in the summer of 2006 in an effort to coordinate economic development activities in Downtown Brooklyn and ensure implementation of public and private development projects in the area. The DBP works in close partnership with the City of New York to:
- expedite design and construction of public capital projects
- facilitate the development of commercial and residential real estate projects
- create strategies for corporate recruitment and the reuse of undercapitalized properties
- advance the development of cultural venues and public space within the BAM Cultural District
- coordinate transportation planning initiatives
- spearhead an area-wide branding and marketing campaign
- improve area business conditions and quality of life.
The DBP incorporates the functions of four existing not-for-profit organizations providing economic development services within Downtown Brooklyn (Downtown Brooklyn Council, BAM Local Development Corporation, MetroTech Business Improvement District and Fulton Mall Improvement Association) and has an annual operating budget of approximately $8 million.
The DBP has a staff of approximately 25 and is overseen by a Board of Directors comprised of leaders from Downtown Brooklyn’s corporate sector, academic institutions and cultural community.
A little vague, right? And what about that $8 million budget? Only $2 million is coming from the City, and the BID budgets don’t add up quite that high. So who are the private funders? We placed some calls, but got no answers.
Well, we’ve gotten our hands on an internal email, dated August 16, 2007, containing a complete listing of contributors (after the jump) and amounts paid. We figure it’s in the public interest to know exactly who has been financing the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s activities, and therefore has former Bloomberg administration economic development officials at their disposal to advocate for their projects.
A post on Brownstoner about FUREE’s upcoming annual convention has generated a wave of comments that are pretty astounding in their hostility to the people and businesses that have been in the area all along. Other posters are fighting back in defense, and the messages are worth reading. Here are some of them:
I think community organizing is important. Too often developers get away with anything they want as community boards and city planning let developers do whatever they want.
Only when community members get involved do people get what they want. So what is wrong with letting people ask for what they want.
I hope that community members fight hard for what they want. Nobody will fight for them.
****
That shopping area exists as it is, in fact, because it is profitable and ideally located in the middle of the second biggest subway hub in NYC. Of course it used to be an almost exclusively white space (not that white people ever notice when something is predominantly white) until all of your parents and grandparents fled to the suburbs. Those without that luxury or option filled the vacuum of white flight. The businesses in Fulton Mall are a reflection of that and the concomitant disinvestment by the city, as well as the lack of capital resources available to the tenants for major structural improvements.
But these days white flight is going the other way; the upper-middle class is pouring back into cities and suburbanizing them as quickly as possible, remaking them in their own image. And just like their parents couldn’t possibly understand why blacks would be angry about economic disenfranchisement, social exclusion, and segregation (yes! I am talking about 20th century BROOKLYN here), these wonderful new “Brooklynites” can’t possibly imagine why people would be angry enough to fight back, when what little space and community they have garnered for themselves is ripped away to make room for the aesthetic taste and consumer culture of the “upper class.”
***
I’m one of those white suburbanites who grew up and moved to Brooklyn, and a big reason why is because I couldn’t stand the lack or racial and economic diversity where I grew up. Downtown Brooklyn has a long history of racial cooperation, since back when those houses on Duffield Street were Underground Railroad stops and free slaves settled the neighborhoods nearby. The proposed redevelopment threatens to upset the historic balance we have and impose an unwanted homogeneity on our racially mixed neighborhood. Whether or not I shop downtown or on Smith Street is irrelevant. Smith Street already exists for me to shop on, and downtown Brooklyn exists for my neighbors. The expected cultural encroachment is greedy and unnecessary.
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